Students: Get Free Developer Tools Through GitHub

It pays to be a student.

via readwrite

students

Hacking new technologies can be time-consuming … and expensive. So to help students create technical projects or learn how to use new tools, social coding site GitHub and a handful of technology partners have created theGitHub Student Developer Pack that provides access to 14 developer tools for free.

The project has been in the works for over a year, said John Britton, education evangelist at GitHub. The company already provides a free "micro account" to students, which provides them with five free private code repositories; this plan normally costs $7 a month. (GitHub’s normal free plan requires all such "repos" to be public). Now it’s expanding on that offer with limited free access to tools like Stripe for payment processing and DigitalOcean for cloud hosting.

Many companies offer free services to students who aren’t shy about asking for them. But Britton says most companies make these offers on an individual basis, because it takes time and effort to manage an entire student services database.

“Students would write and ask GitHub for tools—a lot of companies are happy to do it, but it’s ad-hoc,” Britton said. “It’s an administrative burden. We thought, ‘If we’re going to do the administrative work anyway, why not offer other tools as well and take the admin responsibility?’”

Over 100,000 students have already used a free GitHub account.

While it’s a charitable move on GitHub’s part, it won’t just benefit students. Once aspiring coders and engineers have grown accustomed to certain services, they’ll likely stick with the ecosystems they know when the free trial expires. That means more customers for companies like Stripe, which is waving fees for students on the first $1000 in revenue processed.

GitHub Developer Pack

It will also benefit teachers who want to teach a class in something like game development. If they want to use the Unreal game engine, for instance, teachers can tell students to sign up for a GitHub Student Developer Pack, which will save each student almost $20 per month.

Students must sign up through GitHub and show proof of student status such as a university dot-edu email address or a student ID card. If neither is available, GitHub says an enrollment letter or transcript will work as well. Any student aged 13 or older can sign up for an account.

Participating companies will rely on GitHub’s student verification. So once students sign up through the company, they’ll get coupon codes or unique access links and can begin to use the full suite of services.

The offerings are as follows:

  • Atom: A free text editor from GitHub
  • Bitnami: Business 3 plan ($49/month for non-students) for one year
  • Crowdflower: Access to the Crowdflower platform (normally $2,500/month) and $50 in worker credit
  • DigitalOcean: $100 in platform credit
  • DNSimple: Bronze hosted DNS plan ($3/month for non-students) for two years
  • GitHub: Micro account (usually $7/month) with five private repositories while you’re a student
  • HackHands: $25 in credit for live programming help
  • Namecheap: Free domain name registration on the .me TLD and one free SSL certificate for one year
  • Orchestrate: Free developer accounts for students (normally $49/month)
  • Screenhero: Free individual account while you’re a student (saves students $10/month)
  • SendGrid: Free student plan for one year (saves students $5/month)
  • Stripe: No fees on first $1000 in revenue processed
  • Travis CI: Free private builds (normally $69/month)
  • Unreal Engine: Free access to the service (usually $19/month)

The world’s largest photo service just made its pictures free to use

Getty Images is betting its business on embeddable photos

Article from The Verge

If you go to the Getty Images website, you’ll see millions of images, all watermarked. There are more than a hundred years of photography here, from FDR on the campaign trail to last Sunday’s Oscars, all stamped with the same transparent square placard reminding you that you don’t own the rights. If you want Getty to take off the watermark, you’ll have to pay for it.

"OUR CONTENT WAS EVERYWHERE ALREADY."

Starting now, that’s going to change. Getty Images is dropping the watermark for the bulk of its collection, in exchange for an open-embed program that will let users drop in any image they want, as long as the service gets to append a footer at the bottom of the picture with a credit and link to the licensing page. For a small-scale WordPress blog with no photo budget, this looks an awful lot like free stock imagery.

It’s a real risk for the company, since it’s easy to screenshot the new versions if you want to snag an unlicensed version. But according to Craig Peters, a business development exec at Getty Images, that ship sailed long ago. "Look, if you want to get a Getty image today, you can find it without a watermark very simply," he says. "The way you do that is you go to one of our customer sites and you right-click. Or you go to Google Image search or Bing Image Search and you get it there. And that’s what’s happening… Our content was everywhere already."

Gettyembed

THE NEW EMBEDS STRIKE DIRECTLY AT SOCIAL SHARING

Looking at the pictures on Twitter, it’s hard to disagree. Wildly popular accounts like @historyinpics can amass hundreds of thousands of followers with nothing but uncredited, unlicensed images, and since there’s no direct revenue, there’s little point in asking them to pay. At that scale, anything more expensive than free is a prohibitive cost. The new embeds strike directly at that kind of social sharing, with native code for sharing in Twitter and Tumblr alongside the traditional WordPress-friendly embed code. Peters’ bet is that if web publishers have a legal, free path to use the images, they’ll take it, opening up a new revenue stream for Getty and photographers.

The new money comes because, once the images are embedded, Getty has much more control over the images. The new embeds are built on the same iframe code that lets you embed a tweet or a YouTube video, which means the company can use embeds to plant ads or collect user information. "We’ve certainly thought about it, whether it’s data or it’s advertising," Peters says, even if those features aren’t part of the initial rollout.

THE DIGITAL SHIFT HAS BEEN HARD ON PHOTOGRAPHERS

The clear comparison is the music industry, which was hit hard by piracy in the ’90s and took decades to respond. "Before there was iTunes, before there was Spotify, people were put in that situation where they were basically forced to do the wrong thing, sharing files," Peters says. Now, if an aspiring producer wants to leak a song to the web but keep control of it, they can drop it on Soundcloud. Any blog can embed the player, and the artist can disable it whenever they want. And as Google has proved with YouTube, it’s easy to drop ads or "buy here" links into that embed. "We’ve seen what YouTube’s done with monetizing their embed capabilities," Peters says. "I don’t know if that’s going to be appropriate for us or not." But as long as the images are being taken as embeds rather than free-floating files, the company will have options.

EMBEDS HAVE ENABLED A NEW KIND OF LINK ROT

Getty Images’ profits haven’t cratered like music conglomerates: its profits actually increased nearly $100 million from 2007 to 2011, thanks in part to digital licensing. Still, the digital shift has been hard on photographers, with professional stipends increasingly replaced by smaller payments to amateur or freelance photographers. Part of Peters’ promise is that the new embeds will open up larger flows of money down the road.

The biggest effect might be on the nature of the web itself. Embeds from Twitter and YouTube are already a crucial part of the modern web, but they’ve also enabled a more advanced kind of link rot, as deleted tweets and videos leave holes in old blog posts. If the new embeds take off, becoming a standard for low-rent WordPress blogs, they’ll extend that webby decay to the images themselves. On an embed-powered web, a change in contracts could leave millions of posts with no lead image, or completely erase a post like this one.

Still, such long-term effects are years away, if they happen at all. In the meantime, Getty Images is focused on the more immediate problem of infringement. "The principle is to turn what’s infringing use with good intentions, turning that into something that’s valid licensed use with some benefits going back to the photographer," says Peters, "and that starts really with attribution and a link back."

The Federal Registry for Educational Excellence

copy-FREE_logo_betaThe Federal Registry for Educational Excellence (FREE) makes it easier to find digital teaching and learning resources created and maintained by the federal government and public and private organizations.

About the new Beta version

We are excited to introduce a new version of FREE, which is powered by the Learning Registry — an open database for sharing digital learning resources. It runs on a custom version of WordPress, an open source content management system. The new FREE incorporates a responsive design to best serve our customers who access FREE from mobile devices.

The new FREE is a work in progress. We are mapping more and more resources to national and state standards and envision adding more social features to the site in the future.

Free Microsoft Tools

I am currently working with students using Kodu and Photosynth.  I already use Live MovieMaker and Photo Story and find those of great value.  Check them out and see.

Microsoft offers free tools to help engage students in a variety of subject areas—from moviemaking to collaboration to science and beyond. Teachers can download these tools for free, the majority of which require no special training.

http://www.microsoft.com/education/ww/teachers/Pages/free-products.aspx

Open Educational Resources

OER Commons

Open Educational Resources are all about sharing.

In a brave new world of learning, OER content is made free to use or share, and in some cases, to change and share again, made possible through licensing, so that both teachers and learners can share what they know.

Browse and search OER Commons to find curriculum, and tag, rate, and review it for others.

Use the Tutorials as a guide. Join and contribute to the global Open Education community.